I lay on my side on the examination table, fists clenched, shirt folded up to expose a patch of numbed and disinfected skin, waiting for the radiologist to slide the biopsy needle between my ribs and into my liver like a meat thermometer into a chicken. It was May 2008. I was twenty-five, and I felt healthy.

One night a year earlier, I’d begun to feel a deep, radiating pain in my right side like a cramp, which left me doubled over on the bathroom floor thinking about ambulances. It lasted about an hour and then it went away. A few days later, it came back. I went to the doctor. I thought it was a kidney stone; he thought it was a kidney stone; but he sent me for an immediate CT scan “just to be sure.” On my lunch break from work, I found myself on my back in the smooth, clicking white donut of the scanner, holding my breath on command while the technician peered into my abdomen with x-ray vision. The scan showed a small stone, as expected. It also showed a shadowy spot next door in my liver. That’s when the chase began.
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Quantum physicists say that the objects we know—including our own bodies—are made of waves and not particles. Up here in the land of people and puppies and bologna sandwiches, it’s hard to believe. But down there in the land of protons, electrons, and neutrons, waves rule the day.

Until recently scientists could only study the wave nature of matter indirectly, in experiments or with mathematics. Now, the creation of a new substance is allowing physicists to see quantum behavior with their own eyes.

The substance is called a Bose-Einstein condensate, and it’s unlike anything we encounter in our daily lives. It’s the coldest matter in the universe—more than a million times colder than the space between stars. It’s also the most fragile material known, a hundred thousand times lighter than air. When it forms, matter suddenly acts like energy.
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Viagra suggests vigor and virility and evokes the forceful flow of Niagara Falls. Zyrtec and Nexium feature fricatives that imply speed and advanced technology. Lipitor capitalizes on the word “lipids,” and the softness of Sarafem reassures women looking for premenstrual relief.

Such explanations are put forward by drug and advertising companies regarding the strings of sounds that make up their products’ names, but whether they hold water is up for debate.

Many of these made-up words seem to be nothing more than what a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) describes as “a rhythmic cacophony of unpronounceable syllables and emphatic-sounding letters.” Drug-naming experts may offer meticulous explanations of the creative process behind names like Vivelle and Xyzal, but random mash-ups by simple computer programs like the “Drug-O-Matic” at WordLab.com produce equally likely-sounding words like “Runiva” and “Oxyflexol” at the click of a button.
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Just in time for Thanksgiving and the holiday season, researchers are taking a closer look at turkey DNA.

An international consortium has started to sequence the entire genome of the wild and domesticated turkey, meleagris gallopavo.

Information gleaned from reading the turkey’s complete genetic code—its blueprint for life—could help commercial poultry producers grow meatier, healthier, and more productive turkeys, say the researchers.

Genes could be identified for important traits in turkeys raised for their meat, “things like strong legs, body weight, low fat, egg production … and disease resistance,” says Janet Fulton, a molecular biologist at the poultry breeding company HyLine International.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Science Fiction Society boasts a library of more than ninety percent of all science fiction ever printed in English. With about 60,000 books and thousands of magazines, it is touted as the largest open-shelf collection of science fiction in the world. Fans and scholars make pilgrimages to the overstuffed shelves in the MIT Student Center to lay reverent eyes on rare finds. It has made the Society—MITSFS, or “mits-fiss,” for short—famous since the library was created in the early 1960s.

Less known is that the Society began with a different project in mind altogether: to preserve the entire set of Astounding Science Fiction in microfilm. One of the top monthly magazines of science fiction short stories, Astounding first appeared in 1930 and continues today as Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It’s perhaps most celebrated for introducing the world to authors such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein under editor cum talent scout John W. Campbell, Jr.
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After more than fifteen years of searching, the first pictures have been snapped of planets orbiting distant stars, two teams of astronomers have reported.

Most of the 300 known planets outside our solar system have only been seen indirectly. Astronomers have spotted these planets by watching stars wobble as their planets pull on them, or by seeing the total light dim as planets cross in front of or behind their suns.
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A new treatment reverses brain damage in rats after a stroke, according to researchers at the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute in West Virginia.

The only drug currently available for treating stroke in people prevents further damage but does not reverse the injury that has already been suffered. It also has to be given within three hours, when only three to five percent of stroke victims make it that quickly to a hospital. The new therapy could be given as long as twenty-four hours after a stroke, bringing an unprecedented recovery to far more people—if it works in humans the same way it works in rats. Full Article »

Cloaked in orange gas, Saturn’s moon Titan teases us with possibilities. Flying by it more than forty times since 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has been acting like a Peeping Tom, revealing glimpses of mountains, channels and dunes—and, scientists reported in July, the first liquid surface lake found beyond Earth. Does this discovery mean life could be hiding on Titan’s shrouded surface?

“It depends on what kind of life you’re talking about,” says University of Arizona planetary scientist Robert Brown, who identified liquid ethane in Titan’s Ontario Lacus using Cassini’s radar instrument. Water tends to be used as a marker for possible life on other worlds, because that’s how almost all life we know of has developed. But there are plenty of ways, says Brown, that organisms could evolve to live off other molecules.

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